Call for Proposal
Righting the Wrongs: The Decolonial Future of Education
Deadline: July 25, 2025
To learn more and submit, visit: https://www.aera.net/Events-Meetings/Annual-Meeting/2026-Annual-Meeting-Call-for-Paper-and-Session-Submissions
The Decolonial, Postcolonial, & Anticolonial Studies in Education SIG invites proposals for the 2026 American Educational Research Association (AERA) to be held in Los Angeles, California from April 8–12, 2026. Aligning with the conference theme, the SIG’s theme this year is ‘Righting the Wrongs: The Decolonial Future of Education.' The Decolonial Future is a framework that engages us in thinking about what education looks like beyond the historicity of coloniality and modernity. Reimagining the decolonial future of education is not about forgetting the colonial past; rather, it is about bringing the coloniality back to the light to understand and correct the historical erasure of land, language, epistemology, identity, and the worldview of Indigenous and minoritized groups of people. The decolonial future requires ‘decolonizing the mind’ (wa Thiong’o, 1994) and collective praxis for resisting and transforming material and political conditions that perpetuate multiple forms of dispossession, violence, and erasure of identity, land, epistemologies, and autonomy. It calls for defending and promoting diverse forms of knowledge and ways of learning, being, and doing that are born out of struggles to reclaim lands, histories, rights, and identities against colonial adversities sustained through neoliberal greed, war, and genocide.
Problematizing modern education as a form of ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Quijano, 2007), decoloniality is not only about exposing but about righting the wrongs of history. Righting the wrong first requires us to interrogate whose histories have been written and legitimized in and through education. It acknowledges that modern education is a political and colonial project promoting the ideological and epistemic hegemony and violence of Western universalism. Righting the wrong is a political action that involves resistance and activism aimed at correcting the history of injustice. In this sense, decoloniality is a form of ‘praxis’ (Freire, 1970; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018), which involves decolonial awareness and actions countering the coloniality in education. As a praxis, decoloniality aims at “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo, 2009) and “pluriversality” (Escobar, 2018) by countering Western hegemony and creating spaces for diverse epistemologies, beings, and values, primarily of the historically marginalized communities in the Global South, as resources for equitable education policies and practices.
At the core of the decolonial future of education lies reparation. Sriprakash (2023) argues that reparations “compel us to consider the interconnections between past, present and future in both the formation of injustice and its repair” (p. 283). A reparative perspective focuses on responding to the atrocities of colonial violence, dispossessions, and epistemic erasure. It pays attention to righting past and present violences, including epistemic destruction, and repairing them to create education policies and practices, where students and teacher feel safe, belonged, and are recognized as epistemic beings without being censored and punished on the basis of their race, ethnicity, political belief, s*x and s*xual orientations, language practices, and abilities. Reparation rejects forgetting and embraces remembering, as well as collective actions, for reimagining the decolonial future of education.
The SIG calls for proposals on righting the wrongs in education, with a focus on the decolonial future of education. We are open to all kinds of topics that address the following questions:
• Why does decoloniality matter? How can we achieve decolonial goals through education?
• How do we interrogate resistance in education? How are different forms of material resistance against colonial violence supported or censured by educational institutions?
• How do we repair the material, ideological, epistemic, and cultural violence of coloniality in and through education? What are the transformative approaches for a reparative education?
• What does the decolonial future of education look like?
• What policies, plans, materials, and pedagogies can be created and enacted for the decolonial future of education?
• What roles can educational researchers, universities, and schools play in resisting and transforming coloniality in and through education?
The proposals can cover, but are not limited to, any of the following topics.
• Decolonial and abolitionist thoughts
• Decolonial praxis and epistemologies
• Movements, protests and activism in decolonial education
• Relational thinking for decolonial futures
• Structural violence and colonial complicities
• War, settler colonialism and education
• Land, nature and Indigenous consciousness
• Decolonial materials, pedagogies, and classrooms
• Decolonial morality in higher education
If you have any questions, please email Prem Phyak, the program chair, at [email protected]
References
Escobar, A. (2018). Designs for the pluriverse: Radical interdependence, autonomy, and the making of worlds. Duke University Press.
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Seabury.
Mignolo, W. D. (2009). Epistemic disobedience, independent thought and decolonial freedom. Theory, Culture & Society, 26(7-8), 159-181.
Mignolo, W. D., & Walsh, C. E. (2018). On decoloniality: Concepts, analytics, praxis. Duke University Press.
Quijano, A. (2007). Coloniality and modernity/rationality. Cultural Studies, 21(2-3), 168-178.
Sriprakash, A. (2023). Reparations: Theorising just futures of education. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 44(5), 782-795.
wa Thiong’o, N. (1994). Decolonising the mind: The politics of language in African literature. East African Publishers.
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